Monday, November 29, 2004

Redeployee Blues

In the midst of our ever-continuing home renovations, I noticed this poor fly, stuck to the lacquer on our newly-polished floorboards. The poor little bastard had just landed for a moment and found itself forever and lethally stuck to the varnish. We can't pick him out, he's embalmed better than Nicole Kidman at an awards night.

It got me thinking: sometimes you're the one holding the floor roller and sometimes you're the fly.......

(sung to the tune of Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'):

"Re - de - ploy - ee

You're a loser

Redeployee

We don't want you

Redeployee

We can do this

Redeployee

We have power!

Suck eggs, suck eggs, suck eggs, suck eggs, suck s**t ......."

As you can see from my wallowing lament above, the battle with Bulldog and the almighty organisation 'Puny Melee' (using Aussie rhyming slang there) continues.

Despite not technically being a redeployee because my job actually still exists, the head office of Hellfire and Recrimination (HR for short) don't know what else to call me. Being labelled 'redeployee' makes me about as attractive to potential managers as my being tattooed on the forehead with 'I fling poo at people for fun.'

As such, a couple of genuinely promising positions have suddenly evaporated when some carcinogenic cardigan from HR calls the supervisor and says the most threatening sentence a manager of staff gets to hear: (raspy, heavy-breathing voice): "The redeployee ~~rasp, wheeze~~ fulfils all of your selection criteria ~~rasp, wheeze~~ so you are obliged to take her on unless you have some ~~rasp, wheeze~~ extenuating circumstances you haven't advised me of."

The quivering, cowering supervisor of course naturally thinks, 'Oh geez, I'm being backed into a corner here. Puny Melee employs over 2000 people, so what the hell's wrong with this particular freak?' Then, of course, said supervisor advises the HR cardigan that they have just decided that they no longer need to fill the position because - take your pick - the funding's dried up; the existing staff are absorbing the duties; it's already been filled by an external expert; the role's been transferred to another school; they forgot to add the requirement of being able to speak in both Parsil tongue and Ancient Greek coupled with the ability to teach fellow staff how to prove the existence of God and make an edible meal with tofu.

My eight year old daughter, Sapphire, has been picking up on my sombre mood of late and took me by the hand into her room, pointed at her wardrobe and said, "Try one of these, Mum."

Hmmmm. '(Daily) Thoughts of Guidence!'.

It was hard keeping the tears back when I read her advice:

Wise words indeed. As for me, I think I'll just lie down for a while and have a good long think about exactly what I want to be when I grow up.....